Of Merchants & Heros (27 page)

For a while Kleinias just sat on his horse and stared, like a man who has fallen into a waking dream. Then he dismounted. I thought he would fall, but he leant on the horse to steady himself.

‘They have taken your grey colt,’ he said in a strange, slow voice, as if that were the only thing amiss among the devastation.

‘Yes, Father, the colt is gone; but we shall get another.’

He nodded, and repeated, ‘We shall get another.’

Menexenos caught my eye, with a look that said, ‘We must get him away from this.’ But already, with sudden purpose, Kleinias had struck out towards the house.

The antique tables with their delicate marquetry, the fine chests, the couches inlaid with ivory and silver, were burned to dust. Here and there in the charcoal I saw the stump of a fluted chair-leg, or some scrap of cushion that the fire had somehow missed. Through the soles of my boots I could feel the heat still, coming up from the flags.

When I looked up, Kleinias was staring at the ledge. It took me a moment to realize what had been there. Then, with an odd cry, he went stumbling across the room and fell to his knees, and began rummaging in the debris.

‘Leave it Father,’ said Menexenos, stepping up. ‘Let us go.’

But Kleinias did not seem to hear. He raised his hand and stared at what he held there. It was a shard of pot, red on black. Even from where I stood, I could see the painted image. It was the head of a diskos-thrower, crowned with a victory wreath.

Then Kleinias spoke, and his voice was strange and weak and distant. ‘It is enough,’ he whispered. ‘A man can endure only so many defeats.’

It seemed then that his strength left him, and he would have fallen prone in the black dust if Menexenos had not rushed forward and caught him.

‘No, Father,’ he cried, stricken, ‘it will be well again; I will make it well again. Come now, back to the city. There is nothing for us here.’

Between us we got him outside once more. His arm was shaking.

He blinked at the sunlight with empty eyes. A cold finger of fear and horror crept down my backbone, at the sight of such nobility brought low. It was as if his very soul had been extinguished.

We got him back to the city, but he was not the same man who had left it earlier that day.

All the way back, Menexenos kept talking to him: simple reassuring words. But his father did not respond, or even seem to hear. He just stared into the distance, swaying with the movement of the horse.

I could have wept to see their pain, but weeping would do no good, and so I just spoke occasionally, and took care of small things, and made sure Kleinias did not fall.

I had no words that would do justice to his grief, and eventually I gave myself up to my own thoughts, recalling to mind what Titus had once said, that a man has nothing unless he can defend it; that without that, no precious or beautiful or beloved thing is secure, for there are always men who will destroy what some other man has built.

Athens had once been the proud leader of all Greece. Now she had let herself fall to this. And it was not by fate; nor was it by the passing of time. It was by listening too long to the voices of fools.

And here was the true taste of defeat, bitter to the tongue, like the tang of the acrid smoke that hung over the blackened fields.

When at last the high-city showed in the distance through the haze, untouched by the destruction, Kleinias seemed to draw himself together by some act of will. I remembered that his wife, Menexenos’s mother, would be waiting at home for the news. He had to face her.

By the time we walked back through the courtyard door and she came hurrying from the women’s rooms – a thing I had never seen her do before – he had regained a semblance of his old composure.

He took her delicate hand and said, ‘We shall make good, Menexenos is sure of it. And in the meantime we have the town- house, where we can stay until the farm is right again.’

I saw her eyes dart to his face. She must have realized. She was, after all, no fool. But she said nothing, at least in my hearing, and quickly led him inside.

In the city, the mood turned from shock to rage. Up on the Pnyx, the people complained of what they had lost, and cried with one furious voice that someone should have warned them.

The chief Archon, who knew his way with crowds, put forward a motion to have the Strategos impeached. This was done to raucous acclaim. Then decrees were passed, one after another, repealing every honour ever granted to any Macedonian, whatever his virtues.

In the agora and streets, and on the high-city, honorific statues were torn down, and grateful inscriptions chiselled off. The Archon, with a politician’s skill, knew that so long as the Demos’s fury was directed at Philip, it was directed away from him.

One day, returning from the Pnyx, Kleinias found me stripped to the waist in the outer courtyard, practising my sword-work. He sat down on the bench beneath the fig tree, and watched me. I finished off, and setting my sword aside asked him if he was well, and if I could send for the slave, or fetch him something.

All this he declined with a shake of his head. Then he said, ‘Listen now to what we have descended to. Today our wise rulers have decreed that if any citizen by word or deed honours King Philip, then anyone may lawfully put that man to death, without trial or recourse to law.’ He gave a sudden, harsh laugh. ‘Thus the brave Demos wages war – with their tongues.’

It was a relief of sorts when, soon after, the time of the Panathenaia came, for it seemed to me that a frenzy of anger and hatred had taken hold in the city.

It was the hot summer month the Athenians call Hekatombaion.

Up on the high-city the sacrifices were made, and the prayers were spoken, according to the ancient rituals. Then the men and boys who had been selected to compete processed down from the hill and through the agora; and the citizens, distracted for a while from their futile revenge, watched and cheered.

The stadium, which lay outside the walls, on the banks of the Ilissos, had been spared by the Macedonians. This was not from piety or shame however, but because the massive close-laid ashlars could not easily be broken, nor was there anything that would burn or could be carried off.

I went each day, and from the terraces watched the contests, with Kleinias at my side.

I had thought, at first, that he would not come. I had even heard his wife’s voice from the women’s quarters, trying to persuade him to stay at home. But he seemed driven by a fierce determination, and insisted on seeing everything.

As I expected, Menexenos came first in the diskos-throw, outstripping his nearest rival by fifteen paces. When the judges announced the winner, he smiled up to us, and raised his hand.

Naked against the backdrop of white marble and fire-scorched earth, he reminded me of the depiction on the black-glazed trophy vase.

But this was something I kept to myself.

I glanced at Kleinias. His face was absent and immobile. He had said nothing to me, and I could not tell what he was thinking.

After the javelin-throw the judges spent some time measuring the places where the spears had fallen. Finally they announced that Menexenos had won by a handspan. But he stumbled in the long jump, and though he did his best to right himself as he leapt, the weights were off balance, and in the end a heavily built black-haired youth from the deme of Acharnai came first.

Next day came the foot races: the short sprint for the pentathlon, and the separate running races – the long-race and the two-stade sprint around the post. Of these, Menexenos ran only in the sprint, and this he won.

One finds, as a rule, that there is a type who takes best to running, another to boxing, and another still to wrestling. But in the pentathlon, where strength as well as speed count, there is no one type: one year it may be a runner who wins; another year a wrestler who has excelled at the javelin and diskos. It was not, in short, a contest where one could tell the victor by looking – though this did not silence the touts behind the stadium, who claimed to have a hundred ways to predict the outcome.

Last of all was the contest I cared least for: the wrestling. Why this should be, when I had made such a study of war and killing, I cannot tell. Perhaps it was because of what I had seen in the palaistra at Tarentum. But there seemed to me something brutish and unnecessary about it; and though Menexenos had said there once had been a particular excellence to it, I found it hard to see.

I had hoped he would be up against one of the lighter-built runners; but I think, already, I had guessed who it would be, and was not surprised, after the lots had been drawn, when the thickset youth from Acharnai stepped out.

He was not wholly unknown to me. I had seen him once or twice at the Lykeion, passing through with friends. But I had never seen him training there, and supposed he must have used one of the other gymnasions in the city. But when I mentioned this to Menexenos he said, ‘No, he spends all his time out in the country – or he used to, before he lost his farm along with the rest of us. Now I don’t know what he does.’

The wrestling was next day. We had not spoken of it, but now I asked Menexenos what his chances were.

He shrugged.

‘He is strong, and determined – but, then, so am I.’

On the morning of the contest, I went early with Kleinias to the open ground beside the stadium, where the contest was to take place.

All along the bank of the Ilissos the crowds were starting to gather, and already the air buzzed with excitement and expectation.

Food-sellers and wine-sellers had set up their stalls; there were touts taking bets, there were dice games and knucklebone-players; there were quacks full of portentous mystery, with cures for every illness; there were sophists promising quick riches to the improvident; there were well-dressed courtesans, bright and stylish in costly Asiatic silks, standing under parasols held up by their slaves, laughing and talking with their friends; there were rough grim-faced whores from the city taverns, sprawled splay-legged beside the stream, cursing at the boys who splashed them from the water; there was a troop of dancers from Ionia; there were acrobats, jugglers, fire-eaters and rhapsodists.

I found Menexenos’s friends waiting at the wrestling-ground.

They greeted Kleinias respectfully, and made way for him at the front. Though it was early still, the sun was hot, and would soon be hotter still. The air smelled of trampled grass, and men’s bodies, and athletes’ oil.

In due course the judges arrived in procession and took their places under the striped canopy. The signal was given; the pipes sounded; and the competitors, naked and oiled, filed out before them. Menexenos’s friends cheered, and so did I.

Beside me, Kleinias was quiet. He peered at the bulky youth from Acharnai, as if he were there in the sand-strewn ring himself, about to fight him. He had his walking staff in his hand. His fingers had clenched hard around it; and now and then, unconsciously, he jabbed it into the dusty earth.

I, too, had been appraising Menexenos’s opponent. I had decided, with little evidence to justify it, that he must be some sort of brute.

But now, close up, and viewing him at his best, I could see intelligence in his stolid face. He had bound up his hair with a fillet.

The broad muscles in his back and legs glistened in the sunlight. I had to admit there was a big-boned rustic beauty to him.

The umpire gave the order to prepare. Menexenos, his bronze hair bleached by the sun, and with a band around his forehead, planted his feet and waited. The umpire’s hand descended, and the contest began.

Straight away the youth from Acharnai caught Menexenos, throwing him off his guard with a clever feint. They locked, twisting and struggling; then Menexenos fell. The youth sprang forward, about to leap upon him, but Menexenos rolled with the fall, bunched himself up, and jumped to his feet again, all in one movement.

At this the youth paused and waited, gauging him, watching carefully, his body tense and ready. They locked again, and struggled, and parted, and locked, in a series of inconclusive bouts.

As I looked on, I saw where his strength lay. No one could doubt that he was physically powerful, and at first glance it was easy to take him as brutish and stupid. But his appearance was misleading, and, knowing this, he used it to his advantage, allowing others to misjudge him as a fighter, as I had done. I began to realize that he had thought carefully about the structure and tactics of his fight, and for all he tried to conceal this from his opponent, yet he fought with an almost poetic skill.

Menexenos fell again; then a third time. The last was hard, and for a moment the youth had him pinned.

All around me the crowd were shouting out with cheers of encouragement or advice. But Kleinias was silent, his face set in a deep frown that looked almost like anger.

Menexenos went limp. Then, with a sudden twist and curl, like a snake under a stone, he was free once more. He sprang to his feet, and the fight continued. But, round by round, the Acharnaian was wearing him down, getting the better of him. At one time he played by physical force; at another, just when Menexenos was getting the feel of his tactics, he changed, and fought like someone else: darting, ducking, wheeling, pausing and appraising.

Menexenos fell again. The youth had thrown him with an arm- twist. He held Menexenos prone, pressing his face into the dust, and twisted his arm up behind him. Many men, at such a time, would have switched his arm up just a little too far, tearing the muscles, inflicting pain, and weakening his opponent before the umpire could intervene. But the Acharnaian, to his credit, did not stoop to this.

Beside me Kleinias said, ‘He must pull himself together, or he will lose.’

I said, ‘Yes sir,’ and scowled out at the fighting-ground, suddenly full of resentment at him. At first, indeed, I did not understand it; but then the truth came to me. His was not the support of a father for his son. It was no support at all. Rather, he had set upon Menexenos’s shoulders the burden of his every setback and failure and unfulfilled hope; it was the loss of the farm, it was the dead older son who had fallen from his horse and died, it was the victory crown he had never won. Kleinias had forced him to become not one excellent son, but two; and Menexenos was like Atlas, supporting upon his shoulders his father’s dreams. There were too many reasons why he could not permit himself to lose this fight; and Kleinias, standing there grim-faced, silent, judging, directing his will through his eyes like a beam of fire, was the greatest reason of all.